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Many people have rightly celebrated the life and mourned the death of John Lewis, the US civil rights leader and staunch LGBT ally. Lewis was one of the original Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who refused to accept racial segregation and who engaged in very public protest. The Freedom Riders were very brave and very… [more]
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Over the last couple of weeks, anti-trans activists have been targeting and bullying the women who work in various rape crisis centres. The Survivors’ Network, the rape crisis centre for Sussex, is having none of it. predatory men are already able to enact their abuse with few repercussions, including entering changing rooms and public toilets –… [more]
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I’m currently reading Transgender History by Susan Stryker, and one of the saddening things about it is how little the arguments of anti-trans people have changed – not least the tendency to accuse us of believing things we don’t believe. This is doing the rounds on Twitter at the moment. If a vagina doesn’t make… [more]
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When you move home, you probably arrange to have your postal mail forwarded. It’s worth doing the same if you change your name and your email address. For a while, you’ll arrange for messages sent to your old address to be redirected to your correct one. How long is a while? For me, three years:… [more]
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This is lovely, and hit me hard. Mae Dean, a webcomic author, comes out as trans and has a conversation with herself. [more]
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The UK Government has produced a very long briefing document on the Gender Recognition Act, the Equality Act, official guidance and the debates around gender recognition. The document was published two days ago, on the 15th of July. It seemed to give undue prominence to the views of anti-trans groups but it did accurately report… [more]
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The Guardian is laying off 180 staff. Inevitably and horribly, some people on the internet are being dicks about it and celebrating the imminent unemployment of sales staff, junior editorial staff and so on. These people aren’t losing their jobs because of the paper’s content. They’re losing their jobs partly because of the paper’s business… [more]
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A new study by Ipsos MORI reports that 7 in 10 Britons believe trans people face discrimination, that only 1 in 10 believe trans rights “have gone too far”, and that 6 in 10 women agree that gender and biological sex are not always linked. Given the tone and volume of anti-trans coverage in recent… [more]
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This arrived yesterday. Including obtaining medical reports, the process of getting my Gender Recognition Certificate took ten months and cost nearly £300. I have mixed feelings. That’s partly because I felt I had to get the certificate: the messages coming from the UK government make me worried that it may remove some anti-discrimination protections from… [more]
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Professor Paul Johnson, head of the department of sociology at the University of York, posted this on Twitter today. It’s from the judgement in a 2014 case before the European Court of Human Rights. Society’s problematic “yuk factor” concerning transgender individuals is not a normative idea that should be supported by the law. Sharing Johnson’s… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
